


and it was original sin

by Anonymous



Series: Lunchstuck [2]
Category: Homestuck, Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:26:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26199283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." - Troll Ralph Waldo Emerson(You could probably pick most of what you need to know up from a wiki page or two, but if you haven't already, Homestuck is worth reading at least once.)
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s), don't ship real people ew
Series: Lunchstuck [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1902661
Comments: 3
Kudos: 11
Collections: Anonymous





	and it was original sin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> > _Rust, who smiles, and serves us all  
>  Bronze, with lusii in the flock  
>  Gold, with magic powerful  
>  Green, who likes to run amok  
>  Jade, who always gets along  
>  Teal, the laws the Empress trust  
>  Blue, the fighters and the strong  
>  Which brings us back to rust!_  
> 
> 
> Extremely simplistic rhyme used to introduce landdwelling wrigglers primarily to the castes they were most likely to encounter, and secondarily to the musical scale. Origin: Northern Alternian written records, c. 3126 AJ. 

There was never any other way.

It isn't even a caste thing. A tiresome assumption persists throughout the fleet that if all legislacerators are teal, then the converse must be true. It isn't. Your interest in the law was not birthed from your blood; nonetheless, your veins sing with it. It all started a long time ago, but it really began the first time you met Carson in the flesh. 

"It's not fair," he said immediately after you hugged, glasses smudged with dirt as you drew back. "I can't give you time. Or, not enough." You were too busy drinking in the silhouette of him to argue, unyielding and stubborn under jagged trellis horns. The rarity of your risky excursion underground left him twitchy of movement and wan of smile. Jadebloods took to visitors like clowns took to second chances.

What passed unspoken between you was that your best friend was not the only one with a deficit of time. The lowbloods' luck had not run out as of yet, but there was always Wilbur to worry about. Something uncomfortable in the back of your pan always sparked and fizzed against the casual way that kid described himself. Cullbait. Lusus chow. Even, on one terribly optimistic occasion, the most attractive fuchsia pre-corpse in the Alternian Empire. The easy smile the Heir presented to death would probably render Schlatt catatonic if he ever found out.

Of your strange group, only four really had even a fighting chance. Joko could look after himself with three limbs tied to a wall and the fourth plunged in wet cement. Noah was more likely to die of boredom than by bureaucretin. Cooper was few enough shades from fuchsia himself that he could do whatever he damn well liked, and that included dragging Travis from the front lines. Without ever once having asked, you were aware that that violetblood would sooner slit the Empress' throatstem himself then let his crazy lusus kid get hurt. Which was a good reminder of a paramount piece of evidence. 

"They do their best to pair up moirails," you pointed out lamely into the quiet. It wasn't quite up to the responsibilities of silence. Distant mewling and growling filtered up through the catacombs, the ruckus of life and death. Looking at Carson, swaying on his feet in a green blazer that fit in down there but made you feel terribly underdressed, you imagined the sound a constant. Rubbing the mud from his glasses under the sickly crystalline light, you both fell into contemplative silence.

Back then you nursed a perverse kernel of jealousy for the horror Cooper felt. If there was even an inkling of danger or risk in Carson's future then perhaps you too could have faced it with useless and righteous anger. But his life was already slashed neatly into time, a rich green furrow that ended as abruptly as it began. Come Ascension, provided you made it that far, you would likely never meet again. That was unacceptable.

It was then that you decided. Nothing but the law for you. Not until you found a way to see him. If it wasn't legal yet, if there was no law or loophole, you would make one and step through it. That'd be the night you could relax, and not a beat of the pusher sooner.

One of his colleagues appeared in the doorway as you stared at each other, a battered camera dangling from one horn, and beckoned Carson home. Time up. He sighed heavily, took a shaky breath, wiped his hands together as he turned from you. You couldn't even have this for more than a minute.

"Not for jades, Josh. Not for us." He smiled, then, distant. Unseeing. Like he knew something you didn't. It was not a common expression on his tired face, not over almost a sweep of video calls, but in the twist of Carson's bitten lips you saw a much more familiar fear. 

You imagine that fear as you close Ted's door behind you and the rumble of guilt inside you grows to a roar. 

"Magistragedy Allen, what a welcome surprise."

Mocking your shared youth is as close to camaraderie as Ted gets. You are inclined to play along. In fact, a part of you is unduly flattered. One night you really could be the troll in that robe. Magistragedy Allen. Justice incarnate. Yeah, you could get used to that.

This hive gives you the creeps. Half durable circus canvas, half solid stone, all jutting out over the churning sea. The entire ground floor is clear purple glass, a boiled sweet between you and every horror the ocean has to offer. How he lives here comfortably you have no idea.

"Laughsassin Nivison. Likewise. What do you want?" you sigh, straight to the point. There's a paper at hive due this morning that you need to finish, and cryptic Pesterchum messages from a clown have never been your preferred form of procrastination. He is your least favourite neighbour, which is saying something.

"Nothing, nothing," says Ted, all airy and affronted. Your eyebrows raise with dramatic impunity. "By contrast, I've been getting my knowledge on. I've been doing some real digging. You know your boy's tame little barkbeast? Always yappin' up a storm with his camera?" Ugh. _Getting his knowledge on,_ Empress above. You suppose the holy tongue doesn't come natural to all of them.

"Carson is not _my boy,"_ you snort. Carson is not anyone's boy save the Mother's, and by his whispered admission even she could use a break. "Do go on. Is Dave alright?"

Before answering, he busies himself at the kitchen counter and gestures to a circle of cushions in the middle of the glass. Stupid mind games. You don't care, and you show it by carefully sinking into a seat and not once looking down. Fuck, something big is definitely moving down there. When he lowers himself to your level and passes you a teacup, you know better than to spit it out. That said, boiled Moon Mist Faygo is exactly as tasteful as it sounds.

"Oh, on the contrary, my dear Investigatormenter." Your rank has lowered considerably. This can't be good. "See, I have it on highest authority that the kid's got fuckin' poison in his pusher. Swill of the condemned behind his eyes." The blank expression on your face must be a real rare treat. You've always been a bright child, but he spells it out for you anyway like the naive little boy he sees. "The brightest lime sail you ever saw upon the sea, and your moirail safe harbour."

Shit.

"Shit," you say intelligently, bright green pop dripping down your chin. You imagine it to be the colour of treason. Nodding, the movement made sluggish with solemnity, Ted stands to his full looming height. "Why tell me that?" As purplebloods go he always has been tidy, almost sacrilegiously so. The round glasses he adjusts pinch his sharp nose, accentuate the plum stain that blooms from his pupils. Your own irises remain a childish flat grey.

"Our most caring and mild tyrian brother," and he pauses to chuckle, so it might be an insult, "has been pulling at some of the many strings at his disposal. A veritable marionette he has made of his sensibilities." As usual, his shithive amateur clownbabble elucidates absolutely nothing. Your claws flex in consideration. So Wilbur has his grubby prongs in everyone's business again. In this context, there's only one thing he could have been tampering with.

"We're to be partners?"

"Pass the entrance exam, and yes." It's a clear challenge. He looks at you over the rim of his cup and wiggles his eyebrows, daring. It's certainly tempting. You'd rather have this sly motherfucker - religious epithet intended - than a random pubescent purpleblood who can hardly tell a courtblock from a gallows.

More pressingly, legislacerator training means no conscription. It makes it likelier that you won't disappear on the front lines. It doesn't make it any likelier that you'll make it out the other side for Carson's sake. Ted laughs again as if he hears you think this, harsh and grating, and to be quite honest you have no damn idea what it signifies and never really have.

For once in his life, he's almost being genuinely altruistic. If you can just apprehend Dave before Ascension, Carson never has to know about the treason he has almost inadvertently committed. The both of you will be lauded from the beginning of your careers. You will be a prize candidate with a perfect record and your moirail will be alive. In tedium and austerity in the cloisters, but alive.

As you leave Ted pats you familiarly on the back. If you didn't know better, you'd think your ribs shattered. No matter. You know what you have to do.

Your plan is hindered somewhat by the growing presence of Dave in everyone's lives. You meet his matesprit Angie, a cheery goldblood with prodigious editing talent. She will be spared conscription too, she tells you late one day. They'll assign her to propaganda, and she'll keep in touch, and the both of you will find some way to visit your boys. You tell her Carson isn't anyone's boy, and she wrinkles her nub over the Discorpse call. Contagious, dangerous, the hope in her eyes settles into the lining of your acid tract and digs in its claws.

You were five sweeps old when you committed yourself to the law, and seven when Ted gave you a reason to keep at it. Throwing yourself into your schoolfeeding, you study like nobody else you know. When Charlie picks the Public Performance module, you pick Basic Courtblock Antics. When Mason picks Lusus Handling, you pick Interrogative Techniques. The sweep Wilbur takes all music modules, you take every legal history elective available to you with a child's clearance, which is not that many at all. You work.

Somewhere around your eighth sweep you start diluting your sopor until the daymares hardly faze you. Every time Carson says you work too hard, you ask him how many nights he's been awake and he disappears after awkward diamonds. Stolen moments with him when the more matronly jades aren't looking are all that keep you sane.

Sometimes you find yourself playing videogames with Dave and the others for hours, only getting up to secure the curtains against searing sunrise. He even hits it off with Joko, incredibly, and by the time your childhoods draw to a close your eleven have become twelve. Ted in particular adores him. It takes a long time for you to realise that the mutant tip-off was a blatant lie.

Because Dave is a jadeblood; you've met him enough times to know. Once he broke a claw arm-wrestling Joko at a convention, although they laughed it off, and the blot of blood was as dark a green as Carson's own. The stupid fucking clown just wanted to make you a better legislacerator. You don't hate him for the ruse, but you vent about it to his matesprit Madi at some point and she shrugs with haughty cerulean dogmatism.

"If the Heir's letting you be partners with my clown," she says, fiddling with her microphone, "I'd rather you didn't both die _immediately."_ You enjoy her honesty. 

Though the Heir, as it turns out, has bigger problems.

"She doesn't want to fight me," he says listlessly. He doesn't even say it to you - you're just in the background of the call, dithering over a report; the effects of _Tserin_ _v. Larath_ on clinicallous negligence law. It is neither new nor interesting to you, but it needs to be done. You've come too far to fail.

The other two are talking in low tones, a background to your study. For Carson the worknight is over; for Wilbur it never began.

He has grown up cruelly beautiful, in the way of the Empress, and he normally doesn't turn on facecam out of respect for the fear response. He does now, to say something to Carson, and you pull up your next page of research without glancing at him. Unlike the Juvenesce, at least he actually looks approximately like a real teenager. When you live longer than it takes for natural selection to have an effect, there tend to be some pretty significant differences.

"What do you mean?" says Carson as you boredly cast your mind back to Intermediate Courtblock Etiquette and start typing again. "The Juvenesce? Isn't that the whole point?" Yawns unsteady his voice as he shuffles around to clean up, clothes spattered in the night's viscera. He works himself to the bone, works far too hard. But Wilbur is here too, so you file it away for now and keep quiet.

"In theory. But Mum won't let Her," he admits, glum. If you had a caegar for every time you had a friend who called an abhorrent sea monster 'Mum', you'd have a quarter-drachma. Not that much, mind. It's just odd that it's happened twice. "Doesn't like anyone else feeding her, right? So she says either She comes home to kill me and looks after her, or I do it. Or else she'll scream."

You both look up at that. Both flinch, too, even though he isn't doing anything more threatening than dusting a guitar. Carson doesn't even have a lusus, by virtue of being raised and schoolfed by the other jades, and your dad hasn't had to look after you for a very long time. You can see him through the window now, rolling around in bliss, fur matted with pinkish grass stains you'll have to brush out. A kinder old cholerbear there never was. But if Wilbur's eldritch horror of a mother ever even whispers, billions of trolls will die. If she takes it upon herself to scream? There'll be nobody left but her and him and Her.

"Guess you'll live, then," you deadpan, and Wilbur glares into his camera with such force that you both fall off your chairs. As he apologises, fins flapping in penitential distress, you realise that he had never even considered the possibility.

"Guess I'll live," he echoes, lost, and you have never been less scared of him.


End file.
